NE PGCoE Partnership

NE PGCoE Prime Recipient

The MA DPH provides public health services to the state of Massachusetts and serves the greater New England area by providing educational trainings and seminars as a Bioinformatics Regional Resource and acting as an Influenza Sequencing Center.

Lead Academic Partner

As the lead academic partner of the NE PGCoE, the Sabeti Lab has collaborated with and provided technical support to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for many years. Through their expertise in bioinformatics, metagenomic sequencing, and sequencing R&D, they provide the ability for the NE PGCoE to develop and incorporate new, advanced technologies, while acting as a resource for large-scale sequencing needs during outbreaks. The Earl Lab brings additional experiences in bacterial genomics and development of bioinformatics pipelines for pathogen genomic data, ensuring that the NE PGCoE is poised to respond to both viral and bacterial outbreaks.

Through their leadership in metagenomic sequencing methods and contamination control, the Siddle Lab is an important part of technology development in the NE PGCoE, with an additional focus on reducing costs of laboratory methods to enable their partners to spread application in public health settings.

With BSL-4 capacity and extensive experience with some of the world’s rarest and most dangerous pathogens, the NEIDL provides not just support in cases where biosecurity is paramount, but also provides methods and laboratory techniques that would otherwise be outside of the day-to-day scope of public health departments. In this setting, the Connor lab is actively engaged in ensuring members of the NE PGCoE are prepared to apply genomic techniques in all possible outbreak situations.

A leader in data analytics and visualization, Fathom Information Design supports the NE PGCoE through the creation of dashboards and reports for visualizing and assessing the surveillance work done by the public health jurisdictions.

A world-renowned school for medicine, HMS has partnered with the NE PGCoE on public health education and pandemic preparedness. On the scientific side, the Springer Lab brings extensive expertise in developing cost-effective and scalable molecular technologies to detect and track pathogens of local importance.

The Grad Lab specializes in bacterial genomics, particularly N. gonorrhoeae. This expertise is an important part of the NE PGCoE, especially as we tackle the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in N. gonorrhoeae and other local pathogens.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, HMS established MassCPR to assist in addressing the needs of the community during an emergent health crisis, and they have continued to assist in developing ideals and standards for pandemic preparedness. Their skills in community engagement and establishing multi-institutional IRBs, material transfer agreements (MTAs), and DUAs in times of need are invaluable to developing the NE PGCoE.

A leading healthcare system in Massachusetts and the greater New England area, MGH are critical partners for maintaining efficient sample and data transfer workflows. The Lemieux Lab provides assistance and collaboration with sample acquisition and sequencing coordination, largely related to respiratory viruses.

Theiagen Genomics is a bioinformatics consulting firm with an expertise in public health and genomic epidemiology. They offer services in building public health bioinformatics workflows, educational trainings, and support of open-source workflows.

The Grubaugh Lab brings extensive expertise in developing amplicon-based sequencing methods for viral and bacterial pathogens alike. Partnership with the Yale School of Public Health also offers an invaluable opportunity to take a regional approach to tackling public health problems.